Friday, August 05, 2005

Casablancas Training Scouts To Manufacture Army Of "Bitches From Hell"

I finally picked up a copy of that John Casablancas interview in Complex. You people owe me for this one, because it deeply shamed my elitist ass to face the cashier with this sordid rag in-hand. It’s another of those trendy reversible magazines with two covers, this issue boasting tales of Bai Ling bisexuality, a hard-hitting pictorial on the globe’s hottest models (replete with over-saturated colors, honey, and Reddi-wip), a bunch of “reviews” of shoes, snowboards, flavored vodkas, and wristwatches, and an overall full-page-photo to paragraph-of-text ratio of roughly 5:3.

To spare you similar embarrassment, here’s the highlights reel of the fairly short Casablancas piece.

On his auspicious beginnings:

"Modelling was a very catty business when I started, and I was totally atypical. I was not gay, I was not in fashion, and I was not an editor. I was just a more normal, jock kind of guy who liked sports and pretty girls.... I think I was the first male heterosexual on earth to work as a model agent."

On supermodels:

"You take the nicest girl in the world and make her a supermodel and she becomes a monster nine times out of ten.... It makes these girls into really hard-nosed business people. They start out adorable. As they go up the ladder they become increasingly difficult. They become supermodels and really they are bitches from hell."

On Naomi Campbell:

"I repped her originally, and I was the only person to ever fire her.... I like her a lot, but I would not work with her again for all the gold on earth. She was abusive with her booking staff and it was unbearable. Naomi is a ‘bad girl,’ but she is also a very, very good person. She must learn how to manage her anger. When she loses it and beats up nannies or secretaries it causes her trouble.... If someone called me tomorrow and said Naomi was coming to town, I would be delighted to have her at my table. She might throw a glass of wine at somebody, but it would be fun. She’d be sexy and pretty and desirable and exciting."

On his return from retirement:

"Supermodels are not just born. I am teaching a young generation of scouts how to make a superstar.... We have ten girls who could make it – except some have boyfriends who are very destructive, others have leech mothers who will ruin it all, others are dumb or just don’t get it. But I think there are three or four who have the ingredients to take it all the way."

"She has nothing to say from an intellectual point of view. No contribution to make to the human cause. She is an empty shell, one big void as a person. But as a model she is exciting and interesting."